The Foundation Spatial Data Framework (FSDF) is a framework of ten national authoritative geographic data themes that supports evidence-based social-economic decision making across multiple levels of Australian and New Zealand government agencies, industry, research and the community. The AAA data management principles (Authoritative, Accurate and Accessible), articulated for FSDF, are easily translatable to the FAIR Principles and applied to ensure: • Ability to Find data through rich and consistently implemented metadata; • Access to metadata and data by humans and machines while practicing federated data management within trusted data repositories; • Interoperability of metadata and data through adoption of common standards and application of best practices; and • Reusability of data by capturing licencing constraints and information about its quality and provenance. The Location Information Knowledge Platform (LINK) was developed in 2016 as a digital catalogue of FSDF content. This governed, online, dynamic, analysis and discovery tool was designed to enhance the discovery of FSDF datasets, support work planning and indicate the legal frameworks, agency priorities and use case associated with FSDF data. More than 73 Australian government agencies and commercial organisations use this Platform. Current work includes: • Building common high-level and individual lower-level information models (ontologies) for the FSDF and each dataset; • Development of a new architecture for persistent identifiers and identifier incorporation in the datasets; • The ISO 19115-1-based Australian and New Zealand Metadata profile and best practices user guides; and • Testing new workflows for metadata and data governance and integration utilising a set of common cloud-based infrastructure. On realisation, the FSDF will become a necessary component of spatial socio-economic decision making across Australian and New Zealand government agencies and the private sector. FSDF will encourage cross-sector partnerships and enable seamless access to authoritative spatial data across organisational and jurisdictional boundaries, thus contributing to economic growth, improved public safety, meeting legal and policy obligations and sustaining business needs.

In the era of overwhelming amounts of data and information being readily available over the web and other media sources it is vitally important to adopt machine-to-machine readable techniques that enable quick, reliable and repeatable resource discovery and then based on rules and definitions, facilitate determination as to whether the data and information are relevant and fit for purpose. Quality metadata can provide such a tool as: • It allows the creation of multiple discipline specific metadata profiles based on international generic standards (e.g. ISO 19115-1, DCAT2) thus improving data management and interoperability of data • When expressed as an XML, Turtle or RDFXML it provides a machine readable format which is easy to manipulate and automate • Through cross-walks to other community defined standards, it can be easily translated and used by multiple communities, (e.g. from the ISO 19115-1 to DCAT2 and schema.org) • It enables the user to understand the data, its purpose, suitability and usability by capturing the history of acquisition and subsequent transformations, the description and evaluations of data quality, and the data dictionaries used • Through the application of consistent vocabulary tags and persistent identifiers it helps improve data discoverability on the web and also trace its usage and incorporation in derivative products • It records and explains how to access and use data by related services, APIs and other tools Australian and New Zealand Metadata Working Group (ANZ MDWG) has been working on development a consistent methods of implementing such tool across disciplines, communities and sectors to facilitate a conversation, support a wider understanding and consistent application. Numerous communication and educational materials have been developed to support it. The current focus of the group is on development of improving interoperability and consistency of data management and description through developing discipline specific profiles and ontologies. This presentation will examine challengers, achievements and current plans of the ANZ MDWG.

Location can be described and used to spatially integrate and enable data in a number of different ways. In 2018, the Location Index (LOC-I) project was initiated to bring together a number of government agencies aiming to build a framework to support critical government decision making and to contribute significantly to economic, social and environmental sustainability by linking foundation spatial data with observational data and providing a consistent way for seamless integration of data on people, business, and the environment. This GIS without GIS framework brings together modern technological approaches of Linked Data and Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS) as well as important aspects of Social Architecture to ensure relevance, transparency, openness and accessibility of multidisciplinary data for the Australian Government and non-government users. Using this approach, the Loc-I program aims to open a substantial opportunity to all stakeholders by providing a richer set of information to deliver better citizen-centric services, more efficient programs and improved policy advice. Through disseminating new capabilities across Commonwealth agencies, Loc-I objective is to provide users with: stable, persistent and repeatable access to the data increased interoperability with other datasets enhanced information sharing and a greater number of users and re-uses of the data reduced complexity in using of the data standardised governance of data and information and transparency in data management improved efficiency by reduced cost and time in collection, management and delivery governed and managed federated supply chains The Loc-I is looking at extending collaboration by introducing new use cases. A case study was developed to integrate satellite raster data (big data) with vector attribute data (little data). Using Digital Earth Australia Water Observations from Space (WOfS) and Australia Surface hydrology datasets, Geoscience Australia tested how to assign named waterbodies to WOfS giving attribution context to raster information through DGGS.

Any catalogue describing objects will contain metadata: such systems are built to improve findability (F) and accessibility (A). However, a content rich metadata framework, carefully developed by communities with broad interests, can also ensure an interoperability (I) and re-usability (R) of described objects. The Australian Metadata Working Group (MDWG), supported by the Australian and New Zealand Land Information Council and Intergovernmental Committee for Surveying and Mapping, is building one of these FAIR frameworks. The group comprises of federal and jurisdictional governments, research organisations and academia which provides a wide spectrum of use cases of multi-disciplinary community needs. The MDWG recognises multiple aspects of reusability to ensure consistent adoption of the Australian Metadata Profile based on the ISO 19115-1 standard including: Reusability of content: defining a list of elements to ensure content-rich self-describing metadata that can be interpreted by both humans and machines to: capture data dictionaries to enable dataset reconstruction record technical details for services to ensure their correct usage and associated code reuse understand resource quality and provenance to ensure its correct usage specify licence and security conditions to understand preventing the reuse factors consistent reuse of existing community vocabularies (or develop and openly publish new for reuse by others) record resource formats to support access to resources Reusability of the Australian Metadata Profile through publishing its model and XML to ensure consistent adoption of metadata patterns: developing XML examples building user guides and other communication materials Reusability of tools and their deployment: investigation and testing metadata creation, publishing and validation tools, sharing tricks and lessons learnt The MDWG has successfully delivered reusable tools, a consistent profile and user guide plus defined metadata elements with clear purposes. The wealth of combined expertise, sharing of resources and technical support also provided the first example of the ISO 19115-1 standard adoption and re-use of metadata tools, thus, providing great savings to organisations in developing and implementation time and budget.